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My Tesla will allow me to engage autopilot in a school zone, obeying the adjustment I’d set on speed limit - while using, not the correct school zone speed limi

• junon 5y ago
  I'm not a fan of Tesla personally but it is worth mentioning that "autopilot" and "self driving" are not the same. Autopilot is, and has always been, cruise control on steroids. Full self driving hasn't reached the consumer market. To expect your Tesla to be that is lying to yourself.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    I think Elon was the one doing the lying.
  • zardo 5y ago
    Doesn't Tesla have beta software the driver can turn on with the name "Full Self Driving"? And isn't it intended to be used, "beta tested", on public roads?
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      Apparently they came out and said that "Full Self Driving™" isn't supposed to be understood as full self driving.
      • shmatt 5y ago
        Ah, the Wyngz of the AI industry
  • WheatM 5y ago
  • bjtitus 5y ago
    Meanwhile, Tesla seems to be using them nearly interchangeably in its marketing. https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer Tesla attempts to bury the lead by saying drivers shouldn't use these features without being "fully attentive" but uses names like "Full Self-Driving" all over their marketing material. https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
    • tedivm 5y ago
      Elon has also publicized cases where users filmed themselves not being attentive. https://nypost.com/2019/05/10/elon-musk-weighs-in-on-porn-filmed-in-tesla-on-autopilot/ https://nypost.com/2019/05/10/elon-musk-weighs-in-on-porn-fi...
      • heavyset_go 5y ago
        Tesla itself has marketing material that's even worse[1]. [1] https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware-neighborhood-long https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
  • clouddrover 5y ago
    > To expect your Tesla to be that is lying to yourself. No, it's more simple: Tesla has been lying to you. Musk has been claiming full self driving "next year" for nine years: https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-next-year-for-th-1848432496 https://jalopnik.com/elon-musk-promises-full-self-driving-ne... Five years ago Tesla claimed that all cars being produced had the "hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". That was lie too: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now-have-full-self-driving-hardware https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...
  • giobox 5y ago
    Its also worth pointing out what feature set you get with "Autopilot" and even how well those features operate varies a lot depending what country you are in. In the USA, it's gone quite a bit beyond just cruise control on steroids, and will now follow _any_ road no matter how curvy so long as there is a painted center line. In other words, you can turn it on outside schools, in complex urban neighborhoods etc and it will just keep following the road until you disable it or the painted line stops. In many European countries, the system is restricted to a much more traditional lane assist and does not follow tight bends like this. I have a Model 3 with the standard fit "Autopilot" (not FSD) in US and have tried same model in the UK. If you follow Bjorn Nyland on YouTube (popular electric car YouTuber), he also recently discovered how much more advanced "Autopilot" is on the American cars when he drove a US import in Thailand and compared to his previous Norwegian Tesla, despite feature being labelled the same. This all makes having any kind of reasonable discussion on the internet about it really, really hard.
    • simondotau 5y ago
      My car's cruise control turns on even without a painted centre line.
      • giobox 5y ago
        To complicate matters further, conventional Traffic Aware Cruise is technically the third driver assist mode Tesla offer in their cars in addition to "AP"/"FSD", this of course also works without the painted line.
• monkeybutton 5y ago
  Are the signs not delimited by day of week, time and month where you are? E.g. 7:30-18:30 Mon - Fri Sep - Jun Where I live, police can and will ticket you for speeding during those times. Regardless of if there's students around or if school is even in session or not.
  • rdtwo 5y ago
    Yeah it’s a racket they can hit you with double fines at any time they feel like it.
  • com2kid 5y ago
    > Are the signs not delimited by day of week, time and month where you are? E.g. 7:30-18:30 Mon - Fri Sep - Jun In my local area the signs say either "during school hours", "while children are present" or they say nothing at all and you just have to know what hours and days the lower speed limit is enforced.
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    In my state the school zone speed limit is only in effect if it's a school day and there are children around. If all the kids are all inside it's the normal speed limit. I guess Tesla could just use the school zone limit all the time during school times, but people would be annoyed.
    • smachiz 5y ago
      which state has "when children are around" as part of the law? Feels ripe for abuse and kind've unlikely....
      • GravitasFailure 5y ago
        California is one. https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/what-does-when-children-are-present-mean-on-speed-limit-signs/ https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/what-does-when-ch...
• globular-toast 5y ago
  The simplest thing would be to just get rid of the temporary speed limit and set it to 25mph at all times. 25mph is fast enough.
  • smileysteve 5y ago
    Another example of a walkable "neighborhood" (with sports, after school, and community events, community usage of facilities at 6-7 days a week) that we ignore the safety of in favor of cars to get wherever else they are going faster.
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    >"25mph is fast enough." No, it absolutely isn't.
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      It is when you aren’t paying attention:)
    • dan-robertson 5y ago
      I think you’re missing the point. But maybe you aren’t missing the point and just don’t want to explain your speed-limit philosophy?
      • BitwiseFool 5y ago
        The GP said "The simplest thing would be to just get rid of the temporary speed limit and set it to 25mph at all times. 25mph is fast enough." The reason why the speed limit drops to 25 mph during certain times around schools is because that is when children and adolescents are traveling to or from the campus grounds. It makes sense that you would want the speed limit reduced during a period of increased chaos. But it doesn't make the same sense to keep that reduction when the school is out of session, or when classes are taking place and the attendees are almost entirely contained within the campus. And, in real terms, no one likes dropping down to 25 mph on a road that is normally 45 mph at all times. Like it or not, most drivers are not as anti-car as the folks on HN and they absolutely will complain to the city about the low speed limit or just ignore it. At which point, they will go back to conditional 25 mph limits.
• belltaco 5y ago
  >How can Tesla claim self driving Autopilot and self driving are two distinct things.
  • jjulius 5y ago
    Not to the average, non-technical person.
    • jimmaswell 5y ago
      Everyone knows airplane autopilot still needs a human pilot. Everyone.
    • burkaman 5y ago
      I consider myself a pretty technical person and I don't know the difference. Are they not synonyms? Auto=self, pilot=driving
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    And yet a couple years ago, they claimed Autopilot was full self-driving.
    • simondotau 5y ago
      Tesla have two very distinct cruise/steering product grades, one is called Autopilot and another called Full Self-Driving. It seems unlikely to me that Tesla would claim that their first product was their second product.
  • yupper32 5y ago
    Are you saying that Tesla shouldn't claim to have a "Full Self Driving" feature if it's still not autonomous? Because they do. "Will the FSD computer make my car fully autonomous? Not yet. All Tesla cars require active driver supervision and are not autonomous. " https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer https://www.tesla.com/support/full-self-driving-computer
• rhacker 5y ago
  If I see a sign like that near a "church school" or whatever I likely won't know it's 25mph on a Sunday. If there are crossing guards or whatever I'm sure I will stop however, not sure a Tesla will.
• natch 5y ago
  It’s not self driving yet, that’s how.
• pcurve 5y ago
  "How can Tesla claim self driving if the car can’t read a sign that says - speed limit 25 mph during school hours, and properly adjust?" Self driving will always be dangerous unless overall traffic infrastructure is updated. Can you imagine a train where the 100% of the onus of auto-baking falls on the train itself, without zero input from sensors and towers outside the train?
  • jerf 5y ago
    Yes. Such a train wouldn't be allowed to drive. Logical extrapolation of that point left as an exercise for the reader.
  • WJW 5y ago
    Yes? That is pretty easy to imagine actually. It would be much less efficient than the current system with a central train controller, but it is definitely imaginable. In the case of Tesla massively failing to drive safely in a school area: If you cannot operate safely, don't allow autopilot to engage at all.
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    I think the central thesis of OP is that the current infrastructure is built for humans. We seem to do OK. So, if anything, these kinds of issues are an indictment of the failure of self-driving tech that was boosted to insane hype around 2017-2018. Now we're getting to a phase called "Trough of Disillusionment" in the Gartner terminology. If we require the rest of the infrastructure to be rebuilt for self-driving tech, then it is a irrefutable admission of failure.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • bluGill 5y ago
    Reading speed limits signs is the easy part compared to figuring out how to handle all the kids walking to school on the sidewalk next to the road (any kid might get pushed into traffic, or decide to start crossing right there...). Even figuring out school hours is easy. Of course it isn't just kids, I've had to handle a bear on the road in front of me before.
• asdff 5y ago
  Can they handle construction zones where lanes split all over the place and speeds change? I'm guessing no. Based on the constant amount of scuff marks along the guards of the 5 freeway and pretty much every other freeway in California I'm assuming thats a hard challenge even for human drivers.
  • bluGill 5y ago
    All they need to do is recognize a construction zone a minute ahead of time and get the human to take over. This would allow level 4 through construction zone. Level 4 is self driving "in the easy parts", and give humans enough time to take over in the "hard parts" (level 5 is everywhere, and as you note a much harder problem). Note though that you can't just stop driving, you need to allow time for the human to figure out what it going on, how to properly have humans take over is itself a hard problem.
    • elil17 5y ago
      Right, but they don’t do that, do they? Their failure mode is beeping at you to take over at the last possible second.
      • bluGill 5y ago
        There are a number of other ways where they don't meet level 4. Level 4 is fully hands off in specific situations, and Tesla is never hands offs.
    • mjevans 5y ago
      I could see construction zones required to setup self-driving parking buffers for the cars to 'fail' into safely.
  • akerl_ 5y ago
    For what it’s worth, the one thing my Tesla has been consistently good at is picking the correct lines out of a jumble of nonsense on the road. I’ve used AP heavily in highway construction zones, and at night with bad visibility, and in inclement weather, and in combinations of the above. AP does better than I can manually do at picking the correct set of road marks to follow, even in cases where the construction has left partial incorrect marks underneath / conflicting_with the right ones. AP has a ton of other issues of varying levels of severity, but if you’re asking “can I trust it in a construction zone”, I’d say yes based on my usage.
• clvx 5y ago
  Even worse, there are school signs that say 15mph when children are present. Kids could be behind cars, bushes, people, etc. That’s a very hard task to deal with.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    > That’s a very hard task to deal with. Not really though, you could just assume there are kids and do 15mph. Not everything is a hard to solve machine learning challenge.
    • clvx 5y ago
      So many ifs. Look, even if you pass the school zone, kids play around. In rural areas, this is very common. Yeah, you could go at the speed limit, but people are just careful or make a judgment call.
  • abletonlive 5y ago
    I mean if the kids are in the bushes I'm not sure a human would be able to figure that out either. It's been said before: self driving cars don't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And humans are super flawed.
    • Cederfjard 5y ago
      Well, for PR purposes, they might have to be substantially better than humans, or the backlash to incidents might be too great.
    • bcrosby95 5y ago
      The US has about 100 million miles driven per traffic fatality. Humans are flawed but human drivers are way safer than the human detractors would have you think.
      • earleybird 5y ago
        Human drivers "can" be way safer; they aren't always. There's likely some balance where overall, self driving is statistically safer than some group of suboptimal drivers. It remains to be seen but there's always hope.
• dragontamer 5y ago
  > My Tesla will allow me to engage autopilot in a school zone https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1478802681141645322 https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1478802681141645322 Just a reminder at how awful Tesla cars "self driving" cars are at actually stopping. Please do NOT rely upon autopilot, fsd, or any other "Tesla-tech". They're incapable of seeing objects like small children in time. This was a test done at CES on January 6th, 2022. ------- In contrast, the people who setup the demo were showing a more advanced self-driving car who could actually stop when the child suddenly runs out onto the street. https://twitter.com/luminartech/status/1479223353730756608 https://twitter.com/luminartech/status/1479223353730756608
  • hansendc 5y ago
    I think the main point is to know the limitations of the technology and to deploy it appropriately. For instance, I don't rely on old-school cruise control to stop for small children, either, even though I engage it in school zones. This isn't limited to "Tesla-tech". The same rules apply to ALL technology.
    • Miner49er 5y ago
      Why would you ever engage cruise control in school zones?
      • _ea1k 5y ago
        To avoid speeding. It can be hard to avoid accidentally speeding by 1-2 mph and enforcement is sometimes zero tolerance.
        • dekhn 5y ago
          That's crazy, I've never seen anybody get a ticket for 1-2mph over the limit. Problems with that: cops would be wasting resources because 1-2mph over the limit isn't significantly dangerous. Also, the radar guns can't be easily calibrated to that level of accuracy. If our local cops did this, I'd just make an online post about it so everybody knew the cops were doing it and then it would stop. My experience (based on a few tickets and observing many cops) is that they don't really care unless you're about 10+ MPH over the limit and also doing unsafe things. That's not to say they don't snag people just driving 5MPH over the limit, but it's not a core activity unless the department is using tickets as a revenue source or trying to make some sort of weird point.
• lazyjones 5y ago
  This has nothing to do with the article really, but stupid signs will always be a problem as long as they exist. In Austria, there are signs on the highway that allow electric cars to obey a higher speed limit (130 Km/h instead of 100 Km/h; https://autorevue.at/ratgeber/ig-l-immissionsschutzgesetz-luft https://autorevue.at/ratgeber/ig-l-immissionsschutzgesetz-lu... ) provided they have (optional, but now standard) green number plates. My car doesn't know that it doesn't have the green plates, so it cannot know what limit to use. Also, it can't look up the paragraph quoted on the sign to read the current version of the law, presumably.
  • bo1024 5y ago
    Does that make it a stupid sign, though?
    • lazyjones 5y ago
      Yes, because it doesn't contain the necessary information to interpret it and on top of that it's hard to read at highway speeds and thus dangerous.
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  There are no truly self driving cars, and probably won't be. When a traffic cop or school teacher holds up a hand to stop cars or say "turn left NOW", what training data exists? There should be a much stronger involvement from cities / states legislating a ban on any kind of self-driving in these areas. (self-braking -- sure!) It will have to wait for a child to die, unfortunately. I'd like to see a self-lane-keeping lane on interstates with a 120 mph speed limit and concrete barriers. If we can have "Zero emissions" cars incentivized with access to HOV lanes, why not cars that can do a good job at lane-keeping and merge-scheduling in areas where there are exactly zero other distractions?
  • hotpotamus 5y ago
    This reminds me of when I was driving in rural Texas a few months back and came across an apparently very recent accident involving a jack-knifed truck. The firefighters had just arrived on scene. While slowly and carefully driving around the accident, a firefighter got out seemed quite upset with me and seemed to be yelling something at me as loudly as he could, but I couldn't make out a word. I still have no idea if I did something wrong. Driving is 99.9% routine and boring and that .1% is ambiguous and quite potentially life threatening. I share the skepticism of self driving cars.
    • _ea1k 5y ago
      I had someone go in front of me while circling his flashlight as if to proceed. When I did, he casually walked in front of me. He wasn't actually paying attention and was just flinging his light for directing traffic without thinking about it. Yeah, the .1% can be really ambiguous and dangerous.
    • zip1234 5y ago
      Cars are made to be completely quiet inside them, which means there is limited way to communicate with those inside and also that horns are obnoxiously loud.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    > It will have to wait for a child to die, unfortunately. Even then. The US has a pretty high tolerance for that.
• jpollock 5y ago
  The answer is for the car to always drive according to the slowest speed allowed. So, it's always 25mph in that zone. Changing it based on "school hours" is a bad idea anyways.
  • XorNot 5y ago
    This isn't really safer. Driving behind a driver not keeping up with traffic and breaking erratically is a traffic hazard (happened to me a few days ago with a human driver).
    • akira2501 5y ago
      It's generally a bad idea to fit safety regulations around the safety limitations of the item they're regulating. We set speeds, sometimes based on time of day or presence of children. Humans handle this just fine. If your car can't, then the car needs to be fixed or it's "self-driving" functionality entirely disabled. Changing speed limit laws to compensate for these limitations is entirely the wrong direction.
      • XorNot 5y ago
        My point is that FSD needs to be at least as capable as a human to follow speed limit signs. The problem generalises - it's also unacceptable for FSD not to keep up with traffic on a freeway or randomly throw in the brakes to avoid spurious hazards for the same reasons.
    • userbinator 5y ago
      I remember the story on here a while ago about a self-driving car that got rear-ended because it stopped in the merging lane of an empty highway rather than accelerating like any human would...
  • delsarto 5y ago
    In Australia, it's not just little side roads that run by school entrances that have this rule; the school zone thing applies even on fairly major free-flowing roads. Two examples I can think of are https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.9293496,145.0051951,3a,59y,100.02h,97.62t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sw3DtJ1A3rOthzLwiFu_vAA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@-37.9293496,145.0051951,3a,59y,... https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.7710688,151.0985503,3a,75y,108.23h,76.34t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sprRfDx4VubtsH8t7Kd_IJw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.7710688,151.0985503,3a,75y,... As the usual speed limit is quite a bit higher at 70km/h, driving at 40km/h (25mph) outside these times would make you, at best, a rather annoying obstacle to surrounding traffic.
• amelius 5y ago
  Can't we tag children with a 5mph transponder tag?
  • d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    Seems like a good way for child predators to find prey.
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Not if the kids run 6 mph.
      • d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
        slow clap
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• FireBeyond 5y ago
  Absolutely. My 2021 Audi has traffic sign recognition, and recognizes school zone signs, flags them as such on the console and heads up display. It also recognizes the flashing light indicating that the school zone is "active". But yet, Tesla, the "not-dinosaur", screws this up completely? Oof. AND, if you have adaptive cruise, it will absolutely recognize the discrepancy between your speed and school zones, and will decelerate the car to that speed.
  • radlad 5y ago
    Many school zones do not have flashing lights. Isn't the correct answer today that humans should override in these situations? Frankly, as a human I also find "during restricted hours" signs frustrating. How do I know which hours those are?
    • mjevans 5y ago
      A zone near me has two different sign indicator systems. They appear to go off at different intervals. In both cases I don't see humans around. I would not be surprised if the time the crossing guards and children were present was a completely different, third time.
      • rconti 5y ago
        I still don't know what is meant by "when children are present". On the sidewalk? In the playground? In the classroom?
        • aidenn0 5y ago
          I asked a CHP officer once and they said "In or near the crosswalks, including sidewalks near crosswalks." Note that police officers are not necessarily up on all of the intricacies of the law though.
        • freddie_mercury 5y ago
          You act like this is somehow unknowable. Did you try to google for it? Did you look up the actual laws where you are? It isn't hard to find the answer. If you're in California, then Vehicle Code 22352 defines it. The same will be true for every other place in the world.
• nixass 5y ago
  Tesla's self driving is gimmick actually and far from being serious piece of technology.
• cmelbye 5y ago
  Tesla doesn't claim that the car is responsible for setting the correct speed limit -- they actually claim the opposite. From the Owner's Manual: > Warning > Do not rely on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control or Speed Assist to determine an accurate or appropriate cruising speed. It is the driver's responsibility to cruise at a safe speed based on road conditions and applicable speed limits.
  • dawnerd 5y ago
    A problem with that is the car sometimes decides to change the set speed based on the signs and its not always obvious when you're in traffic until the car decides to take off. Alternatively it will slam breaks on if it misreads a sign and you have your speed set high. They need an option for a more dumb cruise control that ignores speed limits.
  • throwaway1777 5y ago
    Of course the fine print covers their asses, but this is not what you’d think watching the marketing demos and YouTube videos around fsd capabilities.
  • cma 5y ago
    That's in the manual, the fan marketing essential says it reads speed limit signs so you don't miss any of the action while your passenger plays Cuphead (I think though eventually they removed the ability for the passenger to play while you drive).
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    We should mail a copy of the owners manual to Elon Musk then because just a few days ago he, for about the fourth time, announced that he would be shocked if "Tesla does not achieve Full Self-Driving that is safer than human drivers this year (and 5 years ahead of everyone)". Maybe we have different definitions of FSD and being safer than a human but to me that includes obeying the speed limits and stop signs https://electrek.co/2022/01/31/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-driving-safer-than-human-this-year-5-years-ahead-of-everyone/ https://electrek.co/2022/01/31/elon-musk-tesla-full-self-dri...
• novalis78 5y ago
  The reality is that life is full of edge cases. For full autonomous driving we probably need full AGI.
  • BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
    It seems to be one of these AI-complete problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    Humans have general intelligence and are pretty bad drivers. Why would a computer intelligence be any better? If anything, a computer intelligence would be more likely to get bored or distracted if their "brain" is running faster than ours.
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Humans are annoying drivers, but they aren’t particularly bad. I’m surprised it is 1 fatality per 100,000,000 miles, that’s not bad…
      • dahfizz 5y ago
        I agree that it's a miracle (or perhaps, a testament to modern engineering) that fatalities are so low. But I don't think fatalities is a great measurement. I've been rear ended twice, and I've seen 4 rear endings happen. Nobody was hurt in any of these accidents, but it was definitely a pain in the ass for everyone involved.
  • Minor49er 5y ago
    I think what we'll end up seeing are the developments of sensors and protocols that are invisible to people, but can be sensed by cars nearby. Traffic lights and road signs will have sensors that emit electronic messages identifying what they are and what rules they are communicating that self-driving vehicles should obey. Other cars will start to have them as well. We may even see small barriers constructed between roads and sidewalks that exist only to discourage pedestrians from entering the road to make automated driving even safer. Your vehicle will be rented from a third party. The owner will legally have to have it registered with the city so that the interior cameras can conduct facial recognition to identify the drivers and passengers. Law enforcement can remotely disable a car and could also send signals to get all other cars to pull over to ease the arrests of carjackers and other criminals. Possibly coming to a small town near you.
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  Interestingly, Tesla’s earliest autopilot software (made by Mobileye) could read and respond to speed limit signs, but MobilEye patented that ability and so when Tesla switched to their in-house software, they lost that ability. Seems insane to me that you can patent reading a speed limit sign, since reading signs is what signs are for and is necessary to obey the law, but there we go… “with a computer” seems sufficient grounds to make something patentable.
  • _ea1k 5y ago
    Current Tesla AP can read speed limit signs too.
  • b112 5y ago
    Heh. I wonder what might happen to a person with a bionic eyes. After lawsuit, signs are blacked out in their vision.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • Sebb767 5y ago
      Technically, to black them out, you'd need to recognize them first - which would violate that patent.
    • netsharc 5y ago
      Ha, subscription fee to pay for the license to the patent troll. Then people will install modded bionic eyes firmware downloaded from Ukranian websites[1]. The future will be like Cyberpunk 2077, except the hacks are just to bypass paywall DRM. [1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/john-deere-tractor-hacks-ukrainian/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/john-deere-tractor-hacks-...
  • Bedon292 5y ago
    I was wondering what happened. I knew they used to be able to actually read the signs, but now its all a database that can be quite wrong. I think the DB is nice to have, since signs can be few and far between, but would really like to see it back to reading signs. I don't understand how that could possibly stand up as a patent. It shouldn't pass the obviousness test. Reading a sign is a super obvious thing to do. But you would still have to spend millions fighting it in court. Which is insane.
• option_greek 5y ago
  Not specific to tesla but I guess the answer is in your question. Most likely all the current self driving efforts across board will fail till we have smart roads. A road that can help a vehicle self drive will ensure the complexity of self driving is reduced. And of course that might mean these roads will have to be human driver, pedestrian free.
• ape4 5y ago
  In addition to knowing the school hours, a self-driving car has to read and understand the sign - in every language.
  • henrikschroder 5y ago
    That's not the biggest problem: All drivers have to obey hand signals from policemen and other people who are authorized to direct traffic. Which means your car has to know what police officers and state troopers and highway patrol and mounties look like where you happen to be located right now, and not be confused by some dude dressed up as one. Oh, and it has to understand the hand signals as well. Good luck little car.
    • caf 5y ago
      I don't think it's reasonable to expect either car or human to determine the distinction between "person dressed as cop" and "sworn police officer acting in accordance with his duties". Probably shouldn't anyway. It's not unusual for civilians at the site of some unexpected hazard to warn traffic.
      • henrikschroder 5y ago
        Alright then, follow me little car into my bodyshop so I can shut you down and strip you for parts.
• BitwiseFool 5y ago
  One way to address this problem is to designate which sections of road are school zoned and which are not. Then, include information about the school zone schedule. I can't imagine this information hasn't been digitized in some way yet.
  • akira2501 5y ago
    Even if it is.. how does it get updated? Or verified? Or protected? Who's at fault if the information is inaccurate?
    • BitwiseFool 5y ago
      I know some municipalities publish this information on their city websites. Granted, I do not know much about municipalities and GIS, but I imagine it is possible this is in some format that can be made available to map data services.
    • nwiswell 5y ago
      It's an easily solved problem: the state legislature writes a law mandating a statewide database, and schools are required to enter their information. Like some other commenters pointed out, ad-hoc situations like police directing traffic and one-direction-at-a-time utility work are a much bigger concern.
  • caf 5y ago
    The mapping data that Tesla uses does know about school zones, as well as other time or season based speed zones, and even weather-dependent speed zones. They all get rendered on screen, with the currently-active zone shown.
• dheera 5y ago
  They don't. This is why stocks like TSLA should NOT be subject to quarterly earnings reports, they should be subject to quarterly safety reports instead and earnings should not be public for a long period of time.
  • pelorat 5y ago
    Well, they are far safer that the other guys, so the same should be applied to all the manufacturers then.
    • dheera 5y ago
      Well, yes. We have an economy run by a corpus of idiot shareholders who neither use the product nor are affected by the product, and are free to crash its value at will, and will crash it when earnings doesn't "beat" expectations, so the company is forced to prioritize the entirely wrong things. If a company wants to "accelerate the transition to clean energy", quarterly earnings is NOT the thing to be prioritizing. Earnings are important for business sustainability, but on much longer cycles than quarterly.
    • gamblor956 5y ago
      Far safer than who? Tesla leads the world in terms of self-driving fatalities. It's not even close; the total deaths involving self-driving vehicles from every other automaker in the world combined is less than 1/10th the number of Tesla self-driving fatalities. Note that I include autopilot in the meaning of "self-driving" here because Tesla does in its marketing.
      • dheera 5y ago
        In terms of total deaths per miles driven, all factors considered, Tesla is very close to the top of the best in terms of safety. Yeah, there are idiots misusing autopilot but there are about a couple more orders of magnitude more people who die due to drowsy driving a car without driver assistance features.
      • kortilla 5y ago
• winternett 5y ago
  Impossible... None of the people mine has hit have ever filed a complaint? [Sorry in advance]
• moralestapia 5y ago
  That, among other things, is pretty much why fully autonomous cars == artificial general intelligence; and that's also why it won't happen this year, neither the next one, neither on the next 10. It will happen someday, for sure, just not soon.
  • john567 5y ago
    I don't think that's correct. Having the ability to reason about what you see can be helpful but it's not necessary. Whatever the most developed version of the Tesla FSD software is, it already recognizes that people (children) can hide behind objects. If you look at the way the FSD development is made you'd notice that they changed from coding to designing AI around a particular task. This is something they started doing quite recently. Inferring speed limits from sign data is one problem but you could extend this to classify driving conditions based on image data from all cameras. Trying to detect a reasonable speed limit based on that, forgoing sign detection entirely. Sure, the car can get it wrong but if you err on the side of caution (which you do) the car will pick the slowest option based on conditions and you won't care because you aren't driving anyway. As horrible as this may sound, ultimate, the system will prove itself when it is involved in fewer accidents and at that point it is a benefit to all. If this doesn't happen then Tesla is wrong but it sure looks to me like they are moving along this path nicely. Driving a car is a simple problem. At least compared to something like general intelligence. You only need to know if it is safe to drive in a particular direction and sure this is a complex problem as you go into the details but it isn't general intelligence hard. We don't even know what intelligence is but we do have something that is looking a lot like cars that can drive themselves. I'm a believer.
• me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
  As a former Tesla owner.. I love the car but I honestly don’t believe full self driving is worth the effort nor necessary. Otherwise Tesla has been great for my portfolio and the couple years of zipping around were great.
• dekhn 5y ago
  You're basically asking the question of what is the minimum sufficient level of general intelligence required to allow self-driving cars to go forward. I instead have a different criteria. If somebody could show that their self-driving car can drive 250 million miles without a person (pedestrian, driver, or passenger) across a fleet and range of conditions, then that's good enough for me (currently, people drive 100 million miles before somebody gets killed). I figure 2.5X more safe than the average human would lead to an enormous savings in lives and one might even make the argument, at that point, that there was a moral imperative to disallow people driving! (BTW I live next to an elementary school and people drive past exceeding the posted limit all the time. I struggle to move my car safely through all the distractions. The one thing that helps the most is the radar which hits the breaks if it thinks I'm gonna back into a person or car.)
  • Barrin92 5y ago
    the roads self-driving cars drive on at this point are heavily self-selected as well. I want see a few thousand self-driving cars interact on the streets of Delhi or see one go through a snowy mountain pass with barely any signs when people make these safety stat comparisons nowadays seems to be often ignored under how much more ambiguous conditions humans still drive safely.
    • dekhn 5y ago
      I don't think either the Delhi Street or Snowy Mountain Pass are really required to deploy self-driving cars to 65% of the drivers in the world.
      • Barrin92 5y ago
        snowy mountain pass maybe not but your average traffic in the world is closer to the cities of India, China, Indonesia or Brazil than a grid system in the suburbs of Phoenix Arizona. Keep in mind the US and Europe account for 10% of the world's population, and I wouldn't even have a lot of confidence in self-driving in your average traffic situation in Rome Tbh I'm not even sure if self-driving as it is covers 65% of the American population. Has anyone ever tried to use a self-driving car on a rural American road?
• throwaway22032 5y ago
  Er, so? My 20 year old Civic will allow me to drive 70mph in a 20. Why shouldn't it? It's my car.
• suifbwish 5y ago
  OR maybe the Tesla is so good at driving it doesn’t need to slow down. Maybe it should actually speed up to give people less time to get in front of it.
  • brokenmachine 5y ago
    *taps forehead*
• morpheuskafka 5y ago
  As far as I know, these signs always have either flashing lights when active or a printed schedule. I don't think it would be enforceable against human drivers otherwise.
  • idop 5y ago
    Very very far from "always". Many say "when kids are present" or "on school days". Some rely on external signs to indicate whether the zone is active or not, and some localities within the US have completely unique signs. And this is just the US. Imagine how much variety there's gonna be outside of it.
    • tompccs 5y ago
      "And this is just the US. Imagine how much variety there's gonna be outside of it." Less than you think. America is an outlier among developed nations for how non-standardised their road signs are.
    • morpheuskafka 5y ago
      Okay, so after checking the MUTCD, the "when children are present" sign is allowed, along with either a list of times or when flashing. One state defines it as any of the below: > (1) School children are occupying or walking within the marked crosswalk. > (2) School children are waiting at the curb or on the shoulder of the roadway and are about to cross the roadway by way of the marked crosswalk. > (3) School children are present or walking along the roadway, either on the adjacent sidewalk or, in the absence of sidewalks, on the shoulder within the posted school speed limit zone extending 300 feet, or other distance established by regulation, in either direction from the marked crosswalk. So this would be a bit difficult to implement. Probably best handled by defaulting to slow down and let the driver override if they determine no children are present.
• wallscratch 5y ago
  Couldn’t there just be some google maps / waze API that jurisdictions can enter speed limit information into for different days and times of the week, and just have the car query that?
  • idop 5y ago
    Judging by just how incorrect information in Google Maps is, I'd say that's a terrible idea. It will be fed incorrect data, and never updated.
• gnicholas 5y ago
  > speed limit 25 mph during school hours I've seen many signs that say 25 mph when children are present. That becomes an interesting judgment call: if children are walking down the street or on the sidewalk, it's clearly triggered. But what if children are playing in a fenced in part of the school? How would a computer know that those kids are not able to easily climb over the fence, and are therefore not 'present' quite in the same way as if they were on the sidewalk?
  • captainredbeard 5y ago
    FYI, children playing in a fenced part of a school qualifies as children present.
    • gnicholas 5y ago
      Citation? I've talked about this with my lawyer friends (I am a lawyer also), and we've never been able to figure out exactly what this phrase means. Surely it isn't meant to be interpreted literally, as this would imply that the lower speed only applies when multiple children (not a single child) are present.
      • LeifCarrotson 5y ago
        It's not meant to be interpreted like a computer program, it's meant to be interpreted like law. I'm pretty confident that a judge could reasonably conclude there's an implied "any" quantifier for children, with 1 child satisfying the criteria. Regardless, here's some caselaw that said it only means when children are arriving and leaving: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17380362196899959705 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=173803621968999... Indeed, here in Michigan most of these signs have hours that they apply, sometimes it's like 7:00 am-4:00pm, other times they split it into a morning and afternoon session...
      • rhino369 5y ago
        In my pre-law days, I tried to argue to an Illinois county judge that it meant outside not just kids were inside the school that day. Got the ticket anyway.
• ajross 5y ago
  Are you not running FSD beta? That's the subject at hand here. And FWIW: my car sees and honors lit school zone signs in my neighborhood. > How does a self driving car make that determination? How does a human driver make that determination? They don't. Those signs don't work, they never have and never will, and they certainly won't in the age of autonomy. Frankly if you *did* want to come up with a solution to this problem, I'd bet on it working better as a data management problem (i.e. do exactly what you said and then geocode the results for the car to interpret) than as a signage problem (i.e. trust people to honor rules that they'll never understand).
• TearsInTheRain 5y ago
  Is it really an issue to just always have the car obey the lower speed limit?
  • brokenmachine 5y ago
    Yes.
• tallytarik 5y ago
  School zone signs around my area actually include a bit of genius design: they are hinged in the middle [1], so during school holidays, the signs are covered up by closing the hinge. [1] https://www.canberratimes.com.au/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/8ae668f4-22fc-4f4d-9a10-b6dd00114939/r0_0_2000_1333_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg https://www.canberratimes.com.au/images/transform/v1/crop/fr...
• Johnny555 5y ago
  How does a self driving car make that determination? Query the school district website for the school, identifying their bell schedule and tacking on a buffer ahead and behind? Assume a school schedule that’s M-F? What if it’s a religious school that operates Sun-Thursday? Now the car has to determine which religious sects obey which calendar? Is it different in each country? Just another example of a massive hurdle self driving cars have…… This isn't just a problem for self-driving cars, school zone laws are ambiguous, even for human drivers... and the rules can differ by locality. This is a problem that states and localities need to figure out. https://mynorthwest.com/1543253/washington-driving-school-zones/ https://mynorthwest.com/1543253/washington-driving-school-zo... https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/education/more-school-zones-post-ambiguous-speed-signs/ https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/education/more-school-zo... https://patch.com/missouri/fenton-highridge/school-zone-speed-limit-sign-brought-confusion-and-a-ticket https://patch.com/missouri/fenton-highridge/school-zone-spee...
• gerash 5y ago
  The rule was created to lower the risk of kids getting hit by a car. So let's focus on achieving the end goal and updating whatever law that is necessary along the way rather than taking the existing laws as gospel. Here it could be signaling to the car where the school or construction zone is so in addition to it lowering its speed it should also bias its perception of kids or construction workers more towards false positive than false negative.
• Railsify 5y ago
  The worst part is that people are paying 12k for "fsd"
• kylebenzle 5y ago
• Accacin 5y ago
  I do not understand how cars can really be self driving IMHO. For example, say I'm going down a residential street and there's a few children playing with a football on the side of the road ahead of me. Well, in that situation I'm thinking "one of them could kick the ball into the road and run out" so I'll premptively slow down and be on "alert" just-in-case that happens. If the worst happens and a child runs out, even though I may have a slower reaction speed than the fancy car, I was already going slower and in the back of my mind I was prepared. I don't see if a car can do that kind of reasoning. Another example I can think of, at traffic lights with a pedestrian crossing, my driving instructor taught me to look out for the lit up "Wait" text, if it's on, I can slow down and preempt that it might change before I pass.
  • rimliu 5y ago
    This is the exact example I use too. Now self-driving till AI has a proper world model, so maybe not ever. Another case: I drive and see an empty paper bag blown onto the road by the wind. I know it is empty because of the way it flew, but "autopilot" may mistake it for the rock and suddenly stop or swerve. Though mistaking rock for a paper bag and driving on would be much worse.
• bumby 5y ago
  >Just another example of a massive hurdle self driving cars have…… This is my thoughts as well, that the promises of AV may have grossly underestimated the problem space. Solving the problem of perception does not equate to solving the problems of driving.
• nswest23 5y ago
  To be fair i wouldn't know that some religious schools are S-Thurs unless it was spelled out on a sign too. Guess a thorough understanding of all types of religious schools and their operating days of the week should be compulsory for getting a drivers license.